 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be talking about five reasons why you should use a tiling window manager now When I say you should use a tiling window manager. I'm not really going to Pressure you in doing it. What you use on your system is a very personal choice That's why we have the term fanboy or fangirl because if you enjoy what you like to use There's really no problem with it. If you're a GNOME person More power to you. GNOME is not for me. If you're a plasma person More power to you. I love plasma. I'm just not going to use it because you know has a lot of dependencies in it And that's basically the same with whatever you use if you're a debut if you're a suckless guy like you know I seem to be have become Good for you. If you're an i3 guy or BSPWM or whatever Use what you like to use. But if you've been thinking about using a tiling window manager and you haven't used one or just started or something I thought I'd go through five of the reasons why I think tiling window managers are the bomb No one actually says that anymore. I don't know why I still do it's probably because I'm still stuck in the 90s Was the 2000s? Man, I'm old Anyways five reasons why you should use a tiling window manager So the first one is That when you navigate through a tiling window manager, you're always going to be using your Keyboard now you can use your mouse. Obviously, I could use my mouse and go period and change workspaces and you know Go to all my workspaces like that, but that's not great Every once in a while, you'll see me on video that I do that that's just because I was apparently Conditioned to use a mouse by you know windows and macOS But really the best way to do it is mod plus, you know say Three or four or five or six or seven and that's just the way you Navigate through workspaces and if you want to open up terminal super enter on my system You know super cute a quit super enter and enter entered open up a whole bunch of terminals It's let's say I wanted to switch these things around and I could do it that way With an a simple key binding I Like that because it means I don't have to drag windows around. I don't have to Use a scroll wheel if I don't want to like even in my browser here I have it set up so I can go up and down with a key with my keyboard and I can click a link with the You know if I wanted to go to a video here I Could just do it that way Using a keyboard just seems more efficient to me It also means that you're use you're moving your wrists around less. So if you have you know repetitive stress injuries carpal tunnel or whatever You don't have to worry so much about moving your mouth your hand around so much with your mouse and I do have those kinds of problems and Using a keyboard has helped with it especially because I have this I don't know if you can see this or not I'm not sure which camera I'm actually on I can't remember I Always look at the wrong camera. I'm really seriously. I Don't need a third camera because it'd be even worse Anyways, I have a quick a wrist rest and It makes my wrist better Anyway, so that's number one the second one is low resources now I can't show you what DWM uses out of the box because I have a bunch of stuff running right now But in terms of resources, it's less than any desktop environment out there almost guaranteed I mean, I'm talking about maybe two or three hundred megabytes out of the box And that's pretty much every tile and window manager out there Even floating window managers will use less resources than a desktop environment because every desktop environment has some things that run in the background Whether it's a you know a plank bar or you know a settings manager or something, you know There's always something that has running in the background now while desktop environments have gotten a lot less Resource intensive in recent years. So like GNOME is not nearly as Resource intensive as it used to be But it still will take about a gig Plasma takes about half of that around 500 depending on what distro you're running and That even that's a little bit more than what a desktop or a window manager would would take So if you're on a low system You could just use you know a window manager and you wouldn't have to deal with all those things that Take up system resources. You can use them for other things like your browser your games or whatever The third reason is that it has the best window. I mean, this is Really weird to say but it has the best window management of any system out there. So when you're in a floating window manager or you're in a desktop environment, you have to go through and Drag your windows to where you want them Every once in a while you'll come across the desktop environment that has key bindings that you can you know Shove a window off to each side or a quadrant or something like that, but it's not front and center It's not how it's meant to be used. It's meant to be used with a mouse dragging things around Tiling window managers Always start full screen. So you open up one app. You have a full screen You open up a second app. They're split in the middle now TWM is a little bit different where one gets us a little bit more bigger percentage than the other You can change that. I just didn't mind it. So I left it this way Same thing and each window you open takes up a certain part of the screen now Depending on what window manager you're using the layout may be different. Whatever That's just that's more of a personal preference of which one you want to use or which one works better for you In this case, if I just wanted to move one of these around. Let's clear clear here Oh page top or something. I don't know. I can move this over to the I can move this into the main stack by You know a keyboard binding a key binding and it's just really simple. It's always going to take up a Part of the screen that you can predict I always know where the next window is going to land when I press You know enter because it's always at the bottom of the stack or in you know bottom of the tree Is what is what they call it? So Basically what this means is that there's no hunting for that you can have a desktop on Or a whole bunch of windows on a desktop environment all open at the same time and you got a kind of drag You know your mouse through each one trying to fit you when you want or you have to have a panel or something That has all your open windows on it or whatever You don't have to do that in Italian window manager because they're all right in front of you now every once in a while I'll lose a window, but I can do something like Alt P. Yeah, this is Rofi and this a lot shows me every single window that I have open It's kind of like alt tab for you know windows or Mac or whatever You know, this just shows me all the Windows I have currently open I have a ton of windows open which is crazy Anyways, that's number three number four is there's no cruft. So by cruft. I mean, you know extraneous Dependencies and software things that you don't really need it in a tiling window manager. You could you know things like software centers or Power management systems or you know, whatever usually in a in a tiling window manager all you really need. I mean absolutely have to have is a terminal and Maybe a compositor if you want, you know Nice window effects, but you don't even have to have a composite like pi-com Literally, that's all you need. You don't even need a bar if you don't want one I mean BWM comes with a bar X monad doesn't come with a bar. There are many window managers that don't come with bars You know if you wanted to go uber minimalist. So it's really window managers are They only have in them what you put in them. So if like I have pi-com going I have a bar You know, whatever I have all these things, but there are things that I've built into them I mean the bar comes with this one, but I've gone through and customizing it or whatever So whereas with a desktop environment, you really have to put up with what other people consider important So with like KDE you have all these You're gonna get all the k-suite stuff probably on every distra. You may never use them You're gonna get all these settings Applications that you may never use and that you wouldn't necessarily need if you were just you know controlling everything through The terminal or whatever when you're using a window manager You get a lot less of those extraneous stuff that makes a desktop environment a desktop environment instead of just a window manager itself The last one I want to talk about is workspaces now Every desktop environment that I know of on Linux has workspaces Even Windows now has a workspace feature and my OS has workspaces But when I use desktop environments before I didn't really use workspaces I was always just had my two monitors and you know when I needed a window out of the way I'd drag it over with a mouse and put it on the other screen or whatever and or you know just change focus or whatever I Didn't use workspaces. They were there, but I didn't use them With tiling window managers at least for me. I found that I use workspaces often. So right now I have Windows on one two three four and six on my my main monitor on My other monitor I have my one two three six eight and nine So I have windows on every single one of those now some of them are terminals like on three here. I Usually keep a couple terminals open for various reasons. Sometimes they have like a be pie top on you know open If I don't have it, you know in a scratch pad. I Always have I'm out of the screen. I have my to-do list and Zim open all the time. I have my mail on another workspace and on I have notion on another space and file manager on eight and Discord and telegram on nine. So I mean I use workspaces like crazy on on Window managers whereas before I just didn't there's something about the way you can't get windows to go away like Technically if I wanted these two windows to top not tile anymore if I wanted to use them in full screen both of them I could do that in monocle mode. I could do that and then I could have like a whole bunch of Windows all in the same Workspace I could do that and it doesn't have to all be terminals. It could be a web browser as well, you know, and I Don't I could have what's that? Open as well, I mean it just have all these windows and now I have they're all open on the same workspace. I could do that But it's messy, you know, it's just not all that great instead. I Just have them all open, you know in a tiling window manager format and Use different workspaces. So, you know, I can have my turk to terminals open here and all the other stuff open on different workspaces and Then navigate between them with key bindings and It just is more efficient because I know where things are. I'm very My second monitors almost always exactly the same as to do this and Zim on one workspace may on the other Notion on another so on and so forth Workspace six on both monitors is always one saw that's the ones OBS that way. I always know where they are whereas With desktop environments, especially like gnome, you had it's hard to go to a specific workspace now like I know In kde you can go through and set your own key bindings To go to a certain workspace and you can set activities and stuff like that. It's all very complicated this is just So much simpler and it's so much more efficient for me And I think it is for a lot of people just because it gives you more Flexibility on where you put your windows, but it also is harder to lose them because you're not stacking them on top of each other They're always visible and in your face. So That is why I think window managers are awesome now There are definite pros to using desktop environments There are certain applications that I miss using dwm. So for example For whatever reason dwm does not come with polka agent installed or running it, you know By default, which means anytime I want to burn a ISO on a USB key using like etcher I have to run it via terminal via sudo I can't Expect that to run because there's no polka agent. There's nothing there to ask for my password Now I could set up something to have it run, but that's something that I would have to do That's not something you have to do in a desktop environment. That's just something that I've missed same thing with Managing other auto start applications a lot of times There are applications that I want to start by default that will actually put themselves in auto start mode So something like dropbox will start automatically in most desktop environments But with window managers, you actually have to explicitly say hey, I want this to start another thing I've missed is the The little icons that go up in the bar Um, I don't whatever they're called the task bar task manager, whatever. I don't know Uh, the ones that allow you to quit dropbox like right now if I wanted to quit dropbox I'd have to run a terminal and say kill all dropbox or run htop and do the you know f9 or f4 or whatever And find it and kill it that way There's no going up to that icon and just quitting setting selecting quit That's just I mean you can Get that obviously there's a way to put that in your bar and almost every window manager I just have it because it seems extraneous and then What would I complain about really? So in the comments below, I'd love to hear what window manager you use or why you don't use a window manager Or what desktop environment you use that's kind of keeping you from using a window manager So leave a comment below. 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